Virtualized computing refers to a model for enabling convenient and on-demand access to a shared pool of physical resources. The resources are generally connected to or hosted at different computing systems that are either locally or remotely connected in a networked environment. The resources that are virtualized may include storage devices, controllers, processing machines, memory blocks, software tools and other services that may be provisioned over said systems or networks.
Since physical resources available at each hosting environment are finite, at times (e.g., during peak demand), requests for a physical resource may surpass the capacity of that resource. Thus, a virtual resource (also sometimes referred to as a virtual machine (VM)) that is associated with such physical resource may need to be migrated from the source host to a destination host with additional capacity. If both hosts are local or within the same network infrastructure, the migration process typically need not take into account migration issues related to autonomy, privacy and security of the network in which the host environments reside.
In contrast, if a virtualized resource is being migrated over a long-distance (e.g., the migration is to a destination host that is remote to the source host network), additional precaution is needed to preserve the autonomy, privacy and security of both networks before, during and after the migration is completed.